The present invention relates to a shredded tobacco supplying device in the cigarette making machine and more specifically to a shredded tobacco supplying device which has a function of processing stems which were separated from the shredded tobacco at the tobacco feeding section.
Among the important tasks for the cigarette makers, the maintaining of the cigarette quality and the reduction in the amount of the shredded tobacco used are gaining further importance as the price of leaf tobacco has shown a remarkable increase in recent years. The cigarette manufacturers are making their efforts to reduce the amount of tobacco as much as possible by reducing the variation in the weight of cigarettes, or by minimizing the collapsing of cigarette to improve bulkiness, or by injecting gases into the shredded cigarette to inflate the volume of cigarette. Although the reduction achieved for each cigarette may be very small, the overall reduction in the amount of tobacco for hundreds of millions of cigarettes will be enormous.
The abovementioned methods have already reached their limits of effectiveness and the manufacturers are looking for new means of reducing the amount of tobacco used.
One of the possible means is to reduce the amount of stems discharged from the shredded tobacco supplying apparatus. With the commonly used shredded tobacco supplying apparatuses, this means to reduce the amount of stems failed to be cut off and contained in the shredded tobacco--which are separated from the shredded tobacoo by the separating device. In other words, the maximum allowable limit of stem size to be rolled together with the shredded tobacco is increased. The ordinary shredded tobacco contains about 0.5% stems. If the allowable stem size is increased so that only 0.4% stems are removed and the remaining 0.1% stems are rolled together with the shredded tobacco, 0.1% reduction of shredded tobacco used will be realized. This will contribute greatly to the cost reduction.
However, as the allowable stem size is increased to include the greater stems to be rolled together with the shredded tobacco, the possibility increases that the pin holes will be formed in the roll paper and faulty cigarettes may reach the consumers. This in turn will greatly impair the manufacturer's credit.
For this reason, the cigarette manufacturer's conventionally recover the discharged stems and reused them as the material of the sheet tobacco. That is, the stems are crushed and mixed with paste. The clay mixture is rolled and dried and then is cut into leaf tobacco and further into small pieces. With this method, a large percentage of separated stems can be recovered but the above-mentioned complex processes are required, entailing enormous indirect expenses.